The third night of the Republican National Convention (RNC), which took place on Wednesday, was full of a staggering level of lying. Speech after speech featured claims that weren’t just misconstrued or mistaken but brazenly false — and this nonsense, apparently, is what the Republican Party has to offer the American people heading into November. After all, the party didn’t even bother writing up a formal platform heading into the convention. Instead, they’re simply going off whatever Trump says, basically. CNN characterized the third night of the RNC as “filled with both egregious dishonesty and careless inaccuracy,” adding:
‘Like nights one and two, Wednesday’s proceedings featured false claims related to the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats, the economy, immigration and other important subjects. On Wednesday, some of the speakers also just got things wrong for no apparent strategic reason — one citing a fake Abraham Lincoln quote, one wrongly claiming James Madison signed the Declaration of Independence.’
Vice President Mike Pence, who’s Trump’s running mate again this time around, was one of the speakers on Wednesday. He claimed, among other things, that the U.S. is “on track to have the world’s first safe, effective coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year,” but there’s no confirmation of this claim, although there is one vaccine — under development by the biotechnology company Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — which is relatively far along in development. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who leads NIAID and who the Trump team has repeatedly sidelined, said last month that the vaccine might not be available for widespread usage until early 2021.
Pence also claimed that Biden “is for open borders,” which is a lie — the Democratic nominee does not support some kind of completely unrestricted immigration. He just doesn’t. Pence also insisted that, during the early part of the Coronavirus pandemic, Trump “took unprecedented action and suspended all travel from China,” which is, again, a lie. The restrictions that the president imposed on travel from China did not ban all travel — U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and some of their family members could still travel freely into the U.S., and tens of thousands of those people did so following Trump’s restrictions.
Meanwhile, another speaker on Wednesday, New York’s Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, claimed that the impeachment of Trump was “illegal” — which is, quite simply, a lie. In impeaching the president, the House followed procedure outlined in the Constitution itself.
In a speech on the same night, former acting Director of National Intelligence and U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell claimed that the “Obama-Biden administration secretly launched a surveillance operation on the Trump campaign,” which is, again, a lie. The Obama administration conducted judicially-supervised surveillance of an ex-Trump adviser, Carter Page, once they were no longer associated with the campaign. Neither in that surveillance nor in any other part of the Russia investigation did federal investigators single out the Trump campaign for targeting on political grounds.
Meanwhile, yet another speaker — Sister Dede Byrne — claimed that Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, support infanticide. As should go without saying, they do not — but the claim otherwise highlights just how desperate that Republicans seem heading into November. Burgess Owens, for instance, who is a Republican Utah Congressional candidate, claimed that “popular members of Congress promote the same socialism [his] father fought against in World War II,” which is a lie. “US enemies during World War II were not socialists or left-wingers of any kind,” CNN notes.
